Monthly Archives: July 2013

Disable or Enable The Sidebar/Desktop Gadgets In Windows 7

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If you don’t use the Sidebar or Desktop gadgets in Windows 7 or if you want to turn them on, you can easily get add or remove them to reclaim some desktop space. All it takes is a simple configuration change.

1.    Open the Control Panel by clicking on the “Start” menu icon then “Control Panel”.
2.    In the Search box, type “features”.
3.    Click the “Turn Windows features on or off” link.
4.    Remove the check beside the “Windows Gadget Platform” option.
5.    Click OK.

If your computer is a little slow, one optimization tip is to remove the check-mark next to “Indexing Service”.

County and City governments that do not use CERTs should be ashamed.

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Lately I have run into two cities and one county that is crying “we need more tax money for first responders!” Yet they violently (yup I said violently) oppose CERTs and threaten to have them arrested if they show up on site. As for the show up on site issue, I have said it before, CERTs and other volunteers should not self deploy. With that said, such an angry attitude against free help shows me the requestors only want power, not to help the citizens of their communities. Continue reading →

Backing up for individuals and home offices

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In the previous article, I wrote on backing up I wrote about how to and what to backup if you are a micro business. Here I want to go into what I believe is needed if you have only 1 to 3 computers to backup. Much of the information is the same, so please excuse the redundancy.

The #1 item I replace on computers is the hard drive, it is a mechanical device and fails. The #2 device is the power supply.

Without a copy / backup of your data, you will lose something and regret it. Yes, I can send off the drive to a “clean” room to recover data. As a rule of thumb it will cost about $1,000 to get your data back, and that is not guaranteed. Continue reading →

For goodness sake get a backup and another and another of your files.

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Can you tell I have run into this again lately?

About a year ago, I was in the ICU room with my grandmother and I received a call from a client who could not find some pictures she wanted. It turns out her close friend had died of cancer. My client could not find the pictures of activities she and her friend had shared. I was able to help her find all of them back to about a year before I started doing work for her. Turns out my customer had not looked for the pictures in years (this is normal, when do you look at old pictures?). My company had built her a new computer over 3 years ago and the pictures had not made the move. We only keep old hard drives for 6 months so there was no way to get the images from there. Prior to us working for this client, they had no backup plan; we had put a NAS in, however her new PC backed up over the old data. I remoted in from the ICU Ward and searched her PC, the company server and the NAS, no luck. Continue reading →